In what has become, without any really conscious intent, my weekly Saturday commentary on a chapter of Acts — I may, in a short while and for nefarious purposes of my own, take a detour to look carefully at part of a chapter in 1 Corinthians and then at part of a chapter in Romans — I come today to Acts 6. This is a very brief chapter, and my comments here will largely deviate from my focus... Read more
David Wilkinson, God, Time and Stephen Hawking: An Exploration into Origins (London and Grand Rapids: Monarch Books, 2001), is discussing the question of what we mean by cosmic fine tuning: Second, why is it that the universe is so near the critical rate of expansion? To see what this means imagine you had a machine which made universes. [On the facing page is a simple little illustration showing an “Acme Universe Making Machine.”] On this machine you... Read more
According to David Wilkinson, God, Time and Stephen Hawking: An Exploration into Origins (London and Grand Rapids: Monarch Books, 2001), a “major unanswered question for the Big Bang model is how does the universe come to be so finely tuned in so many respects. What do we mean by this?” (89). Wilkinson is both Methodist clergyman and theologian and a scientist with a doctorate in cosmology: First of all, the universe on the basis of the microwave background... Read more
It’s Friday noon, Utah time! So, as has happened hundreds of times before, a new article has gone up in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. This one is by Brian D. Stubbs: “Answering the Critics in 44 Rebuttal Points” Abstract: After publishing several articles in peer-reviewed journals, the author published Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary (2011), the new standard in comparative Uto-Aztecan, favorably reviewed and heartily welcomed by specialists in the field. Four years... Read more
I was away from my computer much of yesterday (Thursday) and, anyway, I seldom think about what day of the week it is during these undifferentiated weeks of pandemic-induced social distancing. So I failed to note that a new installment of my bi-weekly Deseret News column went up yesterday morning: “What do you pray for when you’re at war? This Saturday marks the anniversary of the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. A fitting commemoration of that bloody,... Read more
Back on 23 June 2011, nearly a decade ago now, I published the following article in the Deseret News. I share it here again because I think it may have some relevance to our nation’s current woes: For many years, I regarded Helaman 13:5-6 as an example of bad, repetitious prose in the Book of Mormon: “And he said unto them: Behold, I, Samuel, a Lamanite, do speak the words of the Lord which he doth put... Read more
The resident atheist commenter on my blog sometimes likes to point out that many of my science-related entries fall into the “gee whiz!” mode. I think he overstates his claim considerably, but some of my blog entries are definitely intended either to express wonder or to evoke or inspire it. And I don’t feel at all bad about that. “Wonder,” Socrates is quoted by Plato as saying at Theaetetus 155d, “is the only beginning of philosophy.” (And... Read more
For the first time, I’m leaning strongly to the view that Mr. Donald J. Trump will likely lose the presidency in November. Does this please me? Yes. I’ve always thought that he is morally, temperamentally, and intellectually unfit for the job. And no. I’m not at all happy about the prospect of a Biden presidency. Although, in many ways, Republicans in Congress haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory under the Trump administration, I won’t be... Read more
Brian Stubbs is a Latter-day Saint who specializes in the linguistics and particularly the vocabulary of the Uto-Aztecan family of Amerindian languages — a family that, as I understand it, includes such tongues as Shoshoni, Comanche, Hopi, Paiute, Nahuatl, and Tarahumara. He also has advanced graduate training in Semitic languages. Notably, he is the author of Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary (2011). In 2015, he published a potentially revolutionary book entitled Exploring the Explanatory Power of Semitic and Egyptian in Uto-Aztecan,... Read more
Here are four more items that have recently appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Interpreter Radio Show — May 31, 2020 The 31 May 2020 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show featured Martin Tanner and Daniel C. Peterson. In the first hour of the episode, they interviewed Dr. Stanford Carmack by telephone and discussed his research on Early Modern English syntax in the Book of Mormon. In the second hour, Tanner and Peterson engaged in a... Read more
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